Kent Bush: Ready to get off the crazy train

Our marbles are lost. Our toons are loony. Our marchers all have their own disconsonant beats.

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Dodge City Daily Globe - Dodge City, KS

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Posted Nov. 29, 2012 at 7:00 AM

Posted Nov. 29, 2012 at 7:00 AM

Augusta

We have lost our collective minds.

The world has gone so far over the edge that we have no milestones of insanity by which to judge the next crazy occurrence against the last.

Our marbles are lost. Our toons are loony. Our marchers all have their own disconsonant beats.

It may have been so before Barack Obama was elected to a second term in the White House. But those votes shone a light on the irrational idiots who were cloaked in darkness until those votes were totaled.

Some of the people who have blurred the line between conservative and crazy for years are certainly leading the charge of the goofy brigade now. But they have just as many co-crazies on the left joining their parade.

Jamie Foxx goes on the Soul Train Awards and speaks of President Obama as “our lord and savior.”

“It’s like church over here. It’s like church in here. First of all, give an honor to God and our lord and savior, Barack Obama,” Foxx told the crowd.

We may never know if he was poking fun at people like Rush Limbaugh and other right-wing pundits who mock Obama supporters for their overly exuberant praise of the President or if he somehow believes that something about Obama feels really Biblical.

Either way, it was both a stupid thing to say and a masterful way to become relevant again. Shockingly enough, Foxx has a new film coming out at Christmas.

He must really believe no publicity is bad publicity.

Another Obama supporter seems to have taken his worship of Obama to a strange place. Michael D’Antuono produced a painting called “Truth” features Obama depicted as Jesus, wearing a crown of thorns, in a position of a person being crucified.

Surprisingly, the crucifix Obama has a very pleasant look on his face for someone being depicted as a victim of a tortuous capital punishment technique.

How can you call this painting crazy? It’s like the word love. People love their children and they love chocolate ice cream. These people are crazy, but the word has lost its meaning.

Glenn Beck wasn’t about to let people on the left side of the political spectrum take up all the crazy space though. He decided to redepict the 1987 Andres Sorrano artwork that featured photo of a crucifix in a bottle of his own urine.

Beck’s version played on the Obama as a savior meme and he dunked an Obama bobblehead in a bottle of fluid that was also purportedly urine. Of course that “urine” was fake (it even had a green tint which is weird even for Beck) but the crazy shadow had already been cast.

Page 2 of 3 - Then the magazine GQ came out with a column in their humor section that called Mitt Romney the least influential person in the world.

Obviously, this is another shot at a man whose only crime was winning the GOP presidential nomination.

Romney – who received more than 47 percent of the vote on Nov. 6 - was on the list with Guy Fieri, Bobby Valentine, and Adam Sandler.

The authors of the column were obviously not going for credibility or even humor. The attempt was to get as much publicity as possible for the column and the magazine. Being correct wouldn’t do that. Absurdity rules the days in the 24-hour news cycle. It takes a lot of outrage to fuel that machine.

Of course, no list of craziness would be complete without Grover Norquist running around yelling about lawmakers who signed his pledge not to raise taxes. Norquist is angry at those defectors who are willing to compromise to keep the economy away from the fiscal cliff. (I know it is trite. I just didn’t want to be the only columnist in America who hasn’t used the term at least once).

Norquist says he doesn’t believe in compromise. He thinks it is absurd to imagine Democrats would accept entitlement cuts if Republicans would accept some tax increases to improve the country’s revenue.

"If you had a pink unicorn, how many dollars in taxes would you raise to trade for the pink unicorn?” Norquist said. “Since pink unicorns do not exist in the real world, it's never occurred to me to worry about the senator from South Carolina. He's not going to vote for a deal because the kind of 10-1 ratio deal he's talking about with real, iron-clad spending cuts is never going to happen.”

Who is this guy? How did this lobbyist/conservative activist ever convince 95 percent of the Republicans to sign some pledge he dreamed up?

I do believe that a positive tax environment can be beneficial for investment. But at some point the law of diminishing returns takes the Keynesian ideal and turns it on its head.

I think most people believe – as the election results supported – that some tax increases for wealthy people could help the government close its deficit.

What Grover Norquist needs to realize is that people care as much about what he thinks as they do the thoughts of Grover from Sesame Street.

I have no idea when I boarded the crazy train. But I am ready to get off.

I am looking forward to a shift – hopefully soon – back to normal and logical discussion.

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Kent Bush is the Augusta Gazette Publisher. He can be contacted at publisher@augustagazette.com.